Your First Graph

There are three ways to create a new, blank graph in Maltego. This is synonymous to creating a new document in Word, or a new sheet on excel.

Once you have a new graph, you can drop your entities (see entity palette section below), and start running transforms on them.

1: Click the (+) button in the top left corner of Maltego

2: Click on the Application Button and then click "New"

3: Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + T

Once you have created a new graph you will get a fresh page within a new tab, surrounded by a range of control windows as shown in the image below.

Entity Palette

Entities

Entities in Maltego are used to represent different types of information and are represented as nodes on your graph. All the entities that are available in your Maltego client will be found in the Entity Palette which, by default, is found on the left-hand side of your graph. The entities in the palette are categorised into groups with the main categories being Infrastructure and Personal.

There are three aspects of an entity that should be understood before going forward:

Type: this is the type of information that the entity is representing

Value: this is the primary information field for and entity and is always displayed on the graph:

Properties: these are additional information fields for the entity

Adding an Entity to your Graph

To add a new entity to your graph, click and hold on the desired entity and drag it onto the graph area as depicted below:

Once an entity has been dragged onto a graph it becomes one of the nodes on the graph.

Editing an Entity Value

Double click on the text on the entity to edit the entity’s value, the text will become highlighted and you can quickly edit the value:

Entity Details Window

To open the full entity Details window, you can double-click anywhere else on the entity icon besides from the entity’s value. The entity Details window includes four separate tabs described below:

Summary

The entity Summary tab will open first when the entity Details window is opened. The tab contains a summary of all the information of the entity that can be found in more detail in the subsequent tabs in the entity Details window.

The image below shows the Summary page of a domain entity. Thumbnails for all entity attachments are also shown at the bottom of the summary window. There is also a large text area where entity notes can be added or edited.

Attachments

The Attachments tab allows you to view a list of all the file attachments for the entity.

New file attachments can be added by clicking the Attach button. This will open a dialog where a local file can be selected or a URL to a file can be specified which will be fetched by the Maltego client.

File attachments can also be added to an entity by dragging and dropping it from your file manager onto an entity on the graph.

On a Maltego graph, it is shown that an entity has a file attached to it with a paper-clip icon that is displayed on the left-hand side of the entity’s icon as shown in the image below:

Notes

The Notes tab includes a large text area where a note for an entity can be added or modified.

On a Maltego graph, entities with notes can be identified by the yellow page icon on the right-hand side of the entity icon as shown below. Double-clicking the yellow page icon will show the note in a dialog box on the graph as depicted below. This dialog can be closed again by clicking the [X] in the top right-hand corning of the dialog box.

Properties

The Properties tab in the entity Details window show a list of key-value pairs for the different properties that the entity includes. The values for an entity’s properties can also be edited from this window too.